Demography最新文献

Self-employment plays a crucial role in immigrants' economic assimilation. Previous studies examining immigrants' self-employment relied on estimates obtained from national surveys, which could contain measurement error. In this research note, we compare estimates of immigrant men's self-employment obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS) with those from data linking respondents to their tax records. Our findings indicate that the CPS substantially underestimates the immigrant-native gap in self-employment. In some cases, the rate of self-employment for immigrants from administrative data is nearly double that obtained from survey data alone. Measurement error also appears to distort estimated differences in self-employment among immigrants by race, ethnicity, and national origin. The results highlight the greater importance of self-employment for the labor market integration of immigrant men than was previously known on the basis of survey data alone.

From the late nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century, the Canadian government collaborated with Christian churches to operate a network of boarding schools for Indigenous children to culturally and economically assimilate them. These children were taken from their families and placed into residential schools, where they were to be assimilated into the Eurocentric culture of the dominant society. Using a unique restricted-access database that asked Indigenous respondents about their family history with residential schools, in addition to questions on socioeconomic outcomes, I study the intergenerational effects of these schools. Despite previous research showing that residential schools increased human capital accumulation among attendees, I find that residential schools are associated with lower educational attainment among subsequent generations. I present evidence consistent with the notion that both cultural detachment and a breakdown in family relationships contributed to a reversal of the standard relationship between parents' and children's human capital. Encouragingly, I find suggestive evidence that greater access to cultural centers might buffer the harmful legacy of this historical trauma.

The evaluation of innovative web-based data collection methods that are convenient for the general public and that yield high-quality scientific information for demographic researchers has become critical. Web-based methods are crucial for researchers with nationally representative research objectives but without the resources of larger organizations. The web mode is appealing because it is inexpensive relative to in-person and telephone modes, and it affords a high level of privacy. We evaluate a sequential mixed-mode web/mail data collection, conducted with a national probability sample of U.S. adults from 2020 to 2022. The survey topics focus on reproductive health and family formation. We compare estimates from this survey to those obtained from a face-to-face national survey of population reproductive health: the 2017-2019 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). This comparison allows for maximum design complexity, including a complex household screening operation (to identify households with persons aged 18-49). We evaluate the ability of this national web/mail data collection approach to (1) recruit a representative sample of U.S. persons aged 18-49; (2) replicate key survey estimates based on the NSFG, considering expected effects of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and the alternative modes on the estimates; (3) reduce complex sample design effects relative to the NSFG; and (4) reduce the costs per completed survey.

This study assesses the initial effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum on the mobility of academic scholars to and from the United Kingdom (UK). We leverage bibliometric data from millions of Scopus publications to infer changes in the countries of residence of published researchers by the changes in their institutional affiliations over time. We focus on a selected sample of active and internationally mobile researchers whose movements are traceable for every year between 2013 and 2019 and measure the changes in their migration patterns. Although we do not observe a brain drain following Brexit, we find evidence that scholars' mobility patterns changed after Brexit. Among the active researchers in our sample, their probability of leaving the UK increased by approximately 86% if their academic origin (country of first publication) was an EU country. For scholars with a UK academic origin, their post-Brexit probability of leaving the UK decreased by approximately 14%, and their probability of moving (back) to the UK increased by roughly 65%. Our analysis points to a compositional change in the academic origins of the researchers entering and leaving the UK as one of the first impacts of Brexit on the UK and EU academic workforce.

Qualitative research has documented mothers' critical role in supporting adult children during and after incarceration. Yet, the implications of incarceration for mothers have been relatively unexplored. Wealth research has also largely overlooked the influence of adult children on parental wealth. Using linked mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult study, we investigate whether a child's incarceration influences mothers' wealth and whether accounting for child incarceration history helps explain the racial wealth gap. We use an event-study analysis and fixed-effects models to assess the evidence that children's incarceration affects three forms of wealth: financial assets, homeownership, and home equity. We find significant relationships between child incarceration and maternal wealth, but the importance of current versus prior child incarceration depends on the type of wealth considered. We also find that child incarceration is much more detrimental in dollar terms for White women than for Black or Hispanic women, but the financial asset penalty associated with child incarceration is larger in percentage terms for Black women than for White women.

Demographic studies on healthy life expectancy often rely on the Markov assumption, which fails to consider the duration of exposure to risk. To address this limitation, models like the duration-dependent multistate life table (DDMSLT) have been developed. However, these models cannot be directly applied to left-censored survey data, as they require knowledge of the time spent in the initial state, which is rarely known because of survey design. This research note presents a flexible approach for utilizing this type of survey data within the DDMSLT framework to estimate multistate life expectancies. The approach involves partially dropping left-censored observations and truncating the duration length after which duration dependence is assumed to be minimal. Utilizing the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, we apply this approach to compute disability-free/healthy life expectancy (HLE) among older adults in the United States and compare duration-dependent models to the typical multistate model with the Markov assumption. Findings suggest that while duration dependence is present in transition probabilities, its effect on HLE is averaged out. As a result, the bias in this case is minimal, and the Markov assumption provides a plausible and parsimonious estimate of HLE.

Although the growing prevalence of primary-earning mothers is well established, this article uses 1996 and 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation data to show U.S. mothers' rate of transition to primary-earner status increased by nearly 50% over the observed period. The rate of transition to primary earning predominantly increased among mothers with some college experience and mothers racialized as White, largely catching up to the rate among mothers identifying as Black. A decomposition analysis determined that relationship instability in marital and cohabiting relationships accounts for less than 20% of the increased transition rate, although somewhat more for Hispanic mothers. Roughly 75% of the growth in maternal primary-earning spells was attributed to situations in which the mother's earnings increased in isolation or, for mothers with a partner, often paired with a decrease in the partner's earnings. This latter circumstance was particularly the case for mothers identifying as Black or Asian. Findings show that most of the growth in mothers becoming primary earners from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s occurred not because mothers experienced more household economic changes (frequency), but because household economic changes often increased mothers' relative financial contributions (impact). The impact component accounted for the entire increased transition rate across mothers' educational attainment and racial and ethnic identity.

Owning a home has long been touted as a key component of the idealized "American Dream." Homeownership is associated with greater wealth and better health, but the causal impact of homeownership on health remains unclear. Using linked complete-count census and Social Security mortality records, I document Black-White disparities in homeownership rates and produce the first U.S.-based estimates of the association between homeownership in early adulthood and longevity. I then use a sibling-based identification strategy to estimate the causal effect of homeownership on longevity for cohorts born in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The results indicate that homeownership has a significant positive impact on longevity, which I estimate at approximately 4 months.

Prior research has found that immigrants are often overeducated: their educational attainment is higher than required or commonly observed in their occupation. Yet, less is known about the education-occupation mismatch among immigrants' children and grandchildren (the second and third generations). Using the French Trajectories and Origins 2 (TeO2, 2019-2020) survey, we test theoretically grounded hypotheses on the level of vertical (educational attainment) and horizontal (field of study) mismatch in the first, second, and third generations as well as on the mechanisms underlying the mismatch. Results indicate that vertical mismatch is substantially lower in the second and third generations than in the first, supporting the hypothesis that vertical mismatch is largely the result of imperfect international transferability of credentials. By contrast, higher levels of horizontal mismatch persist in the second and third generations among men of non-European descent. Differences in horizontal mismatch between immigrants' and natives' descendants are largely accounted for by initial sorting into fields of study.

Having children is widely regarded as one of the most important benefits and purposes of marriage, particularly in societies that uphold traditional family values. Consequently, the suppression of fertility could have far-reaching implications for marital life that transcend childbearing itself. Previous studies have examined the impact of health-induced fertility suppression, but a gap remains in understanding how policy-induced fertility restrictions affect marital satisfaction. This study employs a nationally representative sample to examine whether Chinese couples' marital satisfaction improves when the potential marital utility on fertility is enhanced following the transition from the one-child to the universal two-child policy in China. Using a difference-in-differences design, the study finds that men who desire multiple children experience increased marital satisfaction after the policy change. Conversely, the same is not observed for women. Our study provides compelling evidence that the increase in marital satisfaction for husbands is driven by the improved evaluation of the marital fertility value rather than other unintended policy effects. Further, the policy-induced satisfaction improvement is more pronounced among men with more severely constrained or deeply ingrained fertility desires. The article discusses the broad impact of fertility policy on family life, the gender-imbalanced perception of this policy shift, and its theoretical and policy implications.